Fair Game (13 page)

Money represented neither luxuries nor pleasures, since he indulged himself in few of either, but rather the security of knowing he would never be at the mercy of public institutions again. To that end he lived simply and invested well, going from project to project like a judicious performer choosing vehicles for advancement, acquiring a reputation for accuracy and positive outcome.

He didn’t expect that this case would jeopardize it.

Meg did not feel like battling the city traffic in her own car, and she disdained the Senator’s limo, instead taking a cab to the restaurant. She didn’t want to be ostentatious, and the town car was hard to miss. In addition, the drivers talked. She preferred to keep this to herself for a while, until she decided if it really was worth pursuing.

She had dressed with care, selecting a two-piece dove-gray outfit, a sleeveless dress and matching cardigan jacket that flattered her dark coloring. She always made the most of her looks, choosing clothes in dark blue and navy, shades of lavender and gray, sometimes cherry red, anything that enhanced what nature had given her. And she had a superb figure, which she kept in trim with a closely supervised diet and the constant activity involved with working for the Senator. So she was ready for the great love of her life. He was tardy, she had to admit, but he might yet appear. At the moment, however, she was more concerned about getting back in time to keep her schedule for the rest of the day, and she checked her memory against the leather-bound calendar in her purse. Everything seemed to be in order, and she relaxed, sitting back against the seat for the crosstown ride.

Ransom was waiting inside the lobby of the restaurant, stationed at the bow window watching for Meg’s arrival. He had called ahead for a reservation and bribed the maitre d’ for a good table, secluded and away from the kitchen noise. The dining room was crowded but subdued, the sort of place where conversation never rose above a low murmur. He had chosen it for that reason; he would be able to talk to her and draw her out, make the first meeting count for as much as possible. He felt tense and a little nervous, as he always did before setting a plan in motion, but he was glad he was getting it underway.

He stepped forward as Meg walked through the door. She looked around briefly, caught his eye, and smiled.

She looked nice, he thought as he closed the distance between them. She had been wearing jeans and a sweater when they met, but now she was more dressed up, with a knee-length skirt and high heels that flattered her legs. She had good legs, he noticed, a good figure in fact, not willowy and slight like the Fair girl’s but full bodied and curvaceous.

This might turn out to be quite pleasurable.

“I wasn’t sure I would recognize you,” she greeted him as he took her hand and shook it.

“I was certain I would know you,” he replied.

They were shown to their table, and Ransom said as they sat, “You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” she replied neutrally.

Too much, he thought quickly. No more flattery; she doesn’t like it and she’ll see through it. Remember how bright she is.

“I’m glad you decided to come,” he added.

She looked at him and nodded. “So am I.”

There, that was better. “I imagine you don’t meet many men the way you met me.”

She grinned. “It’s something to keep in mind if I ever get lonely. I can always have another flat tire. It beats putting ads in the personals columns.”

“I can’t believe you’d ever have to do that.” Careful, not too obsequious.

“Maybe not. But I did have a number of blind dates in college.”

“Really?”

“Really. I had this very popular roommate who was convinced I was burying my youthful potential under a bunch of political science textbooks. I had a work scholarship and a tough curriculum, so I didn’t have a wealth of time to pursue a social life. She was always fixing me up with somebody, usually a friend of her current boyfriend. She had a lot of boyfriends, so I had quite a few arranged dates.”

“Did any of them work out?”

“Some of them, for a while. They weren’t all as bad as the guy in the gorilla suit.”

Ransom beckoned the waiter closer, leaning forward to say to Meg, “The guy in the gorilla suit?”

“It was a Halloween party, and...well, it’s a long story.”

“Something from the bar?” Ransom asked as the waiter appeared at his elbow.

Meg shook her head. “I have to work this afternoon. Just club soda with a slice of lime, please.”

“I’ll have the same,” Ransom said to the waiter.

The man left, and Ransom said to Meg, “Tell me about the Halloween party.”

“Are you sure you want to hear it?” God, she thought, why had she brought up such an adolescent subject? She must be jumpier than she’d realized.

He nodded, smiling.

“Well,” she said, refolding her linen napkin in her lap, “it was October of my sophomore year, and Karen, that’s my roommate, was going to a Halloween party sponsored by her boyfriend Tom’s fraternity. I was just going to stay in the dorm that weekend and catch up on some work, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Tom had a friend, of course, a nice guy, she said, kind of shy but really a wonderful person underneath it all. You know the routine.”

Ransom smiled again. He didn’t, he’d never had a blind date in his life and very few enlightened ones, but he pretended to go along with her.

“And so I dressed up as Fay Wray. You know, that lady in the King Kong movie? The ape is carrying her around when the planes are dive-bombing him on the Empire State Building.”

Ransom nodded. He had seen the film in the army.

“So my date shows up in the gorilla suit, which I expected. But he’s huge, I mean really big, a linebacker on the football team, six foot four and two hundred and fifty pounds. And he can’t talk to me because the head of the suit muffles everything he says, so in order to carry on a conversation he has to take the head off and carry it under his arm like that coach driver in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’”

“I see.” He was, indeed, beginning to get the picture.

“So there we were, at the dance, and he’s lumbering around in this suit, can’t hear, can’t talk, can hardly see, and is crashing into everything, including me. And I’m trying to communicate with hand gestures and standing next to this human obelisk and wishing I was back in my room reading the last three chapters of
Lyndon Baines Johnson: The Exercise of Power
, which was my assignment for the weekend.” Please don’t let him be bored with this, Meg thought, wishing she didn’t have to finish the story.

“And?” he said.

“That wasn’t the worst of it.”

“What was the worst of it?”

“He apparently fancied himself as something of a clown, and every once in a while he would grab me and haul me into the air, literally over his head, and beat his breast with his free hand, making what he imagined to be gorilla noises.”

“Oh.”

“He dislocated my wrist.”

Ransom said nothing, listening in disbelief.

“So we wound up the festivities in the emergency room of the local hospital, having my wrist put in a cast.” She took a sip of the drink the waiter had just deposited in front of her. “And that was my last blind date.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Karen stopped suggesting them after that.”

“I’m amazed you left her alive to say anything at all.”

“Oh, it wasn’t her fault. She was trying to be helpful. She really thought I was missing out on something.”

“But you didn’t.”

Meg shrugged. “I guess I figured if something was meant to happen, it would.”

“A fatalist.”

“Maybe.”

“So am I. There’s only so much you can control in life. The rest is just chance.”

“Like flat tires.”

“Like that.” He fiddled with the salt shaker and asked, “So how did you wind up in your present job? I would think you’d be awfully young for such a responsible position.”

“Senator Fair likes to project a youthful image.”

“I’m sure that’s not the only reason.”

“I’m good at what I do,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’ve been fascinated by politics all my life. I volunteered to work on the Senator’s state campaigns when I was in college and joined his staff when I graduated. I moved up from there.”

“You make it sound easy.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t. But it was what I wanted to do. I’ve had to make sacrifices, of course, but you always have to sacrifice to get what you want, no matter what it is.”

“No regrets, then?”

“None.”

“Do you believe in the Senator that much?”

“I believe in what he stands for, his goals. I couldn’t work for him if I didn’t.”

The waiter returned and they ordered, spinach salad and quiche for Meg, prosciutto with melon and flounder francaise for Ransom. When the server had taken the menus and gone, Meg said, “Enough about me. Tell me about you. What do you do at Premier Leasing?”

“I lease office space for business concerns. Larger outfits have their own real-estate people, but smaller businesses don’t have the time or the money to employ a full-time representative. They contact me with their requests and I find the right kind of site for expansion, a warehouse, a factory, whatever they need. I take a percentage of the purchase price or the lease as my fee.” He had actually done just that years ago, so he could speak of it convincingly.

“I see. Is that interesting work?”

“No.”

Meg burst out laughing. “At least you’re honest.”

He shrugged. “It pays the bills until I can get enough money together to start my own agency.”

“That’s your plan?”

He nodded. “There’s a big future in commercial real estate in this area. Many companies in New York and Washington are finding the cost of doing business in the home area too high and are looking to move, not too far, to keep expenses down. Philadelphia is very appealing in that respect; it has a metropolitan environment, but real estate is cheaper than in comparable cities.”

“You seem to know all about it.”

“I’ve been studying the market for a while.”

The waiter brought their appetizers, and Ransom cut his ham into several slices as Meg dug into her salad.

“How did you get into real estate?” she asked.

Careful. “I was a business major in college, and a friend’s father had a local agency. He just handled residential listings, but it got me started. My friend and I used to work there during the summers, and when I graduated from school I got my license.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“UCLA,” he said promptly. He had actually taken a few courses there, and had a fake diploma from the place, courtesy of a former lover who worked for a lithographer, but if she checked with the registrar’s office he would be in trouble. The trick was to make sure she never got suspicious enough to check.

“Did you like California?”

“I liked it well enough. The climate is great, but boring after a while. Sunshine every day. It got to the point where I was praying for a monsoon.” He had lived there when he was discharged from the army at a base near Los Angeles, simply because he didn’t have the money to travel anywhere else.

“I’ve heard that about the climate. Of course, the earthquakes do provide a change.”

“We weren’t having any earthquakes when I was there. I missed the change of seasons, so I came back east.”

“Do you have any family?”

“All dead,” he said shortly, in a tone that intimated that he did not want to discuss it. He assumed Meg’s good manners would prevent her from pursuing the subject, and he was right.

“My parents still live in the house where I was raised, in Doylestown,” she said. “That’s north of here, quite rural. My father has a grain-feed business.”

“Any brothers or sisters?” One of them might show up and interfere with his plan.

“I have a younger brother in medical school in Iowa.”

Good. Medical students tended to be very busy, and Iowa was far away.

“Why did he go there?” Ransom asked.

“That’s the only place he got into school. It’s difficult to get admitted. You have to go where they’ll take you.”

“Your parents must be very proud of both of you.” How well he had assimilated the nuances of polite conversation. He always knew the proper thing to say.

“Yes, they are,” she replied.

“Do they come to see you often?”

“Almost never. My father has to be surgically removed from his office, and my mother doesn’t like to travel. If I want to see them, I have to go there.”

“You must be different from your mother. Your work involves a lot of travel, doesn’t it?”

Meg nodded. “Especially now. We’re set to cover the whole state in the next six weeks or so.” She giggled as the waiter removed her salad plate. “They’re even giving us a police escort for the trip.”

Ransom’s fork paused in the act of carrying the last bit of melon to his mouth. “Police?” he said.